Scientists Create Beating Hearts in Lab

Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory.

Using a process called decellularisation, the researchers grew functioning heart tissue from dead rat and pig hearts.

Decellularisation is the process of killing all the cells in an organ, in this case an animal cadaver heart, and preserving the architecture of the organ such as the chambers, valves and blood vessel structure.

"We hung these organs in the lab and we washed out all the cells. When you are done, you have this thing that looks like a ghost tissue," Taylor says.

The research team then repopulated the "ghost tissue" with new heart cells taken from newborn and neonatal rats, fed them a nutrient-rich solution and left them in the laboratory to grow.